My last piece, in the June issue (Oldie 207), gave details of all the UK's summer opera festivals. This time, for those who like to venture farther afield, I'm producing - well in advance - information about opera festivals abroad, in Europe and even across the ocean.
I'll begin with Wexford Festival Opera, which for many years has occupied an autumn week in a tiny but charming Theatre Royal in the town's minuscule High Street. That theatre has now been abolished, and this year the festival moves a short walking distance to the Dun Mhuire Theatre, from October 25 to November 5. The operas are Donizetti's Don Gregorio (better known as L'Ajo nell'imbarazzo), a comic opera whose music falls easily on the ear, and Transformations by Conrad Susa. Born in 1935, Susa is an American composer, and Transformations, his first opera, is one of the most frequently performed contemporary American operas. A setting of nine poems from Anne Sexton's book of the same title, it is a highly personal retelling of some of Grimms' fairy-tales, with the singers and the accompanying chamber ensemble parodying popular musical styles, entertainers and dance forms from the 1940s and 50s.
Next year the setting for Wexford Festival Opera will be the silvery towers of Johnstown Castle, an 1840 Gothic Revival castle that stands in lush gardens of ornamental trees and shrubs, but Wexford's new era begins in earnest in 2008 when the Festival Opera returns to its original site on High Street in a new theatre which will have accommodation for 750 people, creating a greater connection to the stage than previously, and a heightened sense of occasion.
The Bavarian State Opera in Munich, opens its 2006-7 opera season on October 27 with Richard Strauss's Salome¸ one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century opera, which it couples with a work commissioned from Wolfgang Rihm - Das Gehege (The Enclosure). (Rihm is a German composer now in his mid-fifties whose earlier operas, especially Jakob Lenz, have been highly successful.) The Munich season continues with Verdi's Don Carlo, Britten's Billy Budd , Puccini's Madama Butterfly and La Bohème, Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice and a complete cycle of Wagner's Ring. On December 2 that transcendent Viennese pantomime, Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, enters the repertoire, followed by Humperdinck's Hansel und Gretel and Massenet's Werther .
Over now to Belgium and the Belgian National Opera at La Monnaie Theatre in Brussels. Their season opens on September 5 with Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail, one of the richest of Mozart's pre-Figaro operas, and one whose message of forgiveness and the returning of evil by good is just as important and relevant to the world today as it was in 1782. Wagner's masterpiece Tristan und Isolde follows in October, followed by Verdi's ever popular La Traviata, which receives nineteen performances in December.
Next, to Italy, to Turin and its beautiful eighteenth-century Teatro Regio. The season opens, appropriately enough, with an Italian opera - Puccini's Turandot, on October 10, but the remaining three operas are works by foreigners - Il Naso ('The Nose') by Shostakovich on October 31, performed by a visiting Russian company, and two ever-popular masterpieces by Mozart - Le Nozze di Figaro on November 11, and Die Zauberflöte , in an Italian translation as Il flauto magico, on December 12. Somewhat oddly, they sing the music in German but speak the dialogue in Italian.
We now cross the Atlantic, and about half of the United States as well, to get to Chicago, whose Lyric Opera is one of the really great American companies. I promised its General Director, William Mason, that I'd let him have his own say about Lyric's 2006-7 season, so I'll end with what he has produced:
'I hope to see many of you at the gala opening night of Turandot on September 16, but please mark your calendars for September 9 as well. That evening, we'll be performing at Millennium Park in a free concert that affords Lyric the opportunity to give something back to our home city. Sir Andrew Davis is on the podium, and the programme features several major artists of the season, as well as our Lyric Opera Orchestra and the stars of the future from the Lyric Opera Centre. The Pritzker Pavilion is a top-notch facility with excellent sightlines and terrific acoustics wherever one sits, and it's hard to beat Chicago's spectacular skyline as a backdrop. So bring your family and friends and be part of this wonderful night.
'David Hockney's stunning production of Turandot premièred here in 1992 to thunderous acclaim. Filled with lush melodies, Turandot was Puccini's last opera - a complex piece requiring a huge chorus and a large stage band, not to mention an eye-popping spectacle! Also interesting is the composer's use of the chorus - it plays a major role in every single act. And, of course, Turandot boasts one of the great crossover "pop" tunes of the repertoire - the stirring "Nessun dorma", which demands the strongest of heroic tenor voices. Look forward to rafter-ringing performances from both Vladimir Galouzine and Johan Botha, and from our leading lady, Andrea Gruber.'
